Anne Hathaway and the push for older motherhood. Is this a good thing?
Pregnant celebrities on red carpets may make later-in-life motherhood look effortless, but BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey is warning that the reality is far more complicated.
Most recently, Anne Hathaway graced the red carpet in a beautiful dress, showing off her bump at 43 years old. While this is Hathaway’s third baby, many women are taking it as proof that women can and should wait until their 40s to become a mother.
“She’s a beautiful pregnant woman. I am so happy for her,” Stuckey says. “And I’m so glad that she is on social media. She’s on the red carpet showing that you can do all of these things. You can have a baby. I also love that she is showing that you don’t have to stop having a baby when you’re 35 just because they call you ‘geriatric’ or whatever it is.”
“You can keep having a baby, and it's beautiful. It doesn’t ruin your life,” she adds.
Now, the media is running with Hathaway’s pregnancy and making it seem as if it's as easy to get pregnant in your 40s as it is in your 20s or 30s.
“The Wall Street Journal published an article on July 13 titled, ‘Your 40s used to be middle age. Not anymore,’” Stuckey explains.
“While I am happy about all the things that I listed, and I’m happy about the contribution of another image-bearer of God to the world, and I think motherhood is fantastic, the risks have not changed in association with pregnancy after 40,” she continues.
“Am I saying that you shouldn’t do it if you are a married woman? No. But just because we changed the name because geriatric was offensive doesn’t mean that the risks don’t exist. It is much more difficult to get pregnant after 35 and especially after 40,” she adds.
But the risks don’t just affect the mother.
“The risks to the baby do increase after that,” she says.
And it’s not just the health risks associated with later pregnancies that have Stuckey concerned, but the unrealistic view of time.
“It is pushing this idea that you can party through your 20s, chase your career through your 30s, choose to settle down when you are 38 and you will be just as likely to get married and have children and be a trad wife when you are 45 as if you did it when you were 25,” she says.
“I just don’t want to sell women this unrealistic vision of what their life will absolutely look like if they defer marriage for promiscuity and for their career to be a girlboss forever,” she continues.
“I don’t have a problem obviously with women getting pregnant later in life. I have a problem with us presenting that as if it ... is the ideal,” she adds.
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The anti-Christian radicalization on college campuses couldn't be more fragile
Evangelist Cliffe Knechtle has spent decades facilitating open-air dialogues about Christianity on college campuses, and what he’s noticed is a massive change over the years.
“People are more emotionally fragile today than they were when we began back in the '80s and '90s,” he tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable.”
While his father grew up in Switzerland, “sat up in the Alps with a gun,” and watched Hitler’s army march toward his country — his grandfather was defending on the frontlines.
It was anything but fragile.
“Today, when Donald Trump wins the election, university students go to a crying room to get counseling. Give me a break. What emotional fragility. What an incredible emotional weakness today compared to the young 18-year-olds who fought against Adolf Hitler,” Knechtle explains.
But that’s not all that’s changed.
“Sexual immorality is embraced in a way that it’s not sexual immorality. It’s normal. So moral relativism and sexual immorality has become so commonplace, that if you stand against that, you are really, really, weird.”
Lastly, he says, “What has become too firmly entrenched is unless you can prove it scientifically, it’s not true.”
“I don’t care if you’re a liberal, you know very well that your critique of the conservatives is a moral, ethical critique. You’re not letting enough immigrants in. You’re elitist. And the conservatives are the same way. And you live a sexually twisted life, a perverted life,” he explains.
“So both are appealing to the moral argument, which I think is exciting because it really shows that we do have consciences, which means there really is a God,” he continues.
His son, Stuart Knechtle, recalls a moment when he was cornered by group of progressives who were distraught that he believed a suicidal 16-year-old girl should be saved.
“That’s devaluing her freedom and autonomy. If anything, you should aid in her decision to kill herself,” he says, mimicking their argument.
“I was shell-shocked, completely shocked,” he says.
“Sure enough, we kind of got around to the point of, ‘Do you guys really mean this?’ ... I think they go to the point of starting to realize just what they were saying. And they were relativizing morality, objective value,” he explains.
“That’s the one that I see where personal autonomy and freedom is considered really the top idea and thing to pursue even more so than the value of human life,” he adds.
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America needs heroes who do not apologize for being heroes
Hollywood can erase Achilles, redefine manhood, and make the hero apologize. It still cannot escape Homer’s warning: Civilization dies when men reject sacred duties. Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” opened to more than $120 million at the domestic box office. Millions will see it, and for many, Nolan’s version will become the only “Odyssey” they know. The fight over this film is therefore a fight over who gets to explain Western civilization to the next generation.
Christopher Nolan may change Homer’s story, but he cannot change the truth beneath it. Hollywood can rewrite the hero. It cannot rewrite the law above him.
Hollywood wants Homer’s name. It wants his monsters, battles, kings, ships, blood, and glory. It simply does not want Homer’s moral world.
The clearest example comes in the land of the dead. In Homer’s telling, Odysseus meets Achilles, the greatest champion of the Greeks. Nolan removes Achilles and substitutes Sinon, a figure absent from Homer’s poem and known chiefly from Virgil’s later “Aeneid.” The film recasts Sinon as an innocent sacrifice and moral conscience, and Odysseus calls him the greatest soldier he ever knew.
“Elliot” Page plays Sinon. This is not an argument about Page’s dignity or talent. Every person bears the image of God. It is an argument about symbolism. Movies communicate through casting as surely as through dialogue. One of Western civilization’s defining male warriors disappears. A newly elevated character replaces him, becomes the moral center, and receives the story’s highest praise for soldierly greatness.
Whatever Nolan intended, the cultural message is hard to miss: The old hero must be displaced, the old understanding of manhood rewritten, and the victorious Western warrior made to apologize for winning.
Homer never presents Odysseus as flawless. He is proud, deceptive, and reckless. His cunning saves lives; his arrogance costs them. Those flaws do not erase his heroism. They make him human. The Western tradition has always understood that a great man can also be a gravely flawed man. The Old Testament’s King David proves the point.
Modern culture increasingly treats male imperfection as proof that male greatness itself is suspect. Nolan therefore turns Odysseus into another Robert Oppenheimer: a brilliant man psychologically crushed by what his brilliance accomplished. The Trojan horse becomes less a triumph of courage and cunning than an original sin haunting its inventor. Victory becomes guilt. Authority becomes a burden. Odysseus returns home only to surrender the throne to Telemachus and leave Ithaca with Penelope. A king becomes an exile.
That is a moral inversion of Homer.
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Homer did not need to weaken men to honor women. Penelope is already one of the strongest women in Western literature. For 20 years, she protects her household, preserves her son’s inheritance, resists the suitors, and outwits the men trying to seize her husband’s kingdom.
When Odysseus returns, Penelope tests him by ordering their marriage bed moved. He knows it cannot be moved because he built it around the living trunk of an olive tree. Homer gives us a courageous husband and an intelligent wife. Their strengths differ, but their dignity does not.
Modern ideology often imagines equality only as interchangeability, as though men and women must become the same or one must dominate the other. Homer offers something richer. Masculine courage does not diminish women. Feminine fidelity does not diminish men. Odysseus and Penelope are great together because their distinct strengths serve the same home.
Why, then, do the secular elite keep returning to the Western classics only to dismantle them?
Because the classics teach that we are not self-created. We inherit a family, a history, a nation, a body, and obligations that precede our desires. That lesson is intolerable to an ideology built on radical autonomy.
A young man who admires Odysseus may conclude that courage, loyalty, fatherhood, and duty are good. A young woman who admires Penelope may discover that faithfulness, wisdom, and defending a household are forms of strength. A child who learns that even kings answer to the divine may ask whether presidents, professors, and politicians answer to an authority above themselves.
That is why the hero must apologize, the father must abdicate, the home must become a prison, and the divine must become a psychological projection. The secular elite do not merely dislike Western civilization. They need Westerners to lose confidence in it.
Yet Nolan’s film accidentally preserves one of Homer’s central truths. Characters repeatedly invoke “Zeus’ law,” which Nolan presents as a version of the Golden Rule. The Greeks called it xenia: the sacred duties binding host and guest. Hospitality demanded generosity from the host and restraint from the guest.
Penelope’s suitors are therefore more than rude houseguests. They are enemies of civilization. They occupy Odysseus’ home, consume his wealth, pursue his wife, and plot to murder his son. They exploit an inheritance they did not build while rejecting every duty that inheritance imposes.
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Our universities, museums, entertainment companies, foundations, and public institutions were built through generations of sacrifice, learning, faith, and trust. Today’s cultural elite inherited them and now use them to teach that Western civilization is uniquely wicked, Christianity oppressive, fathers tyrants, heroes frauds, and the family an instrument of domination. They are Homer’s suitors with graduate degrees. They feast inside the house while condemning the people who built it.
What Nolan calls Zeus’ law points toward a higher law. Christians do not worship Zeus. Homer’s gods are false and morally compromised. Yet even the Greeks understood a truth our enlightened age often forgets: Civilization depends on a moral law higher than human appetite.
Christ reveals that law perfectly: “Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.” Paul goes farther: “In humility count others more significant than yourselves.
Christianity gives sacred obligation its true foundation. We honor the stranger because he bears God’s image. We honor marriage, family, country, and neighbor because every human relationship answers ultimately to God.
Without God, the Golden Rule becomes a fragile suggestion. Why should the powerful restrain themselves? Why sacrifice for future generations? Why preserve an inheritance instead of consuming it? A civilization cannot live forever on moral habits inherited from a religion it has abandoned.
America needs families who read the Bible, schools that teach the classics without apologizing for them, and churches that form courageous Christians rather than timid spectators.
Christopher Nolan may change Homer’s story, but he cannot change the truth beneath it. A man still needs a home worth returning to. A family still needs protection. A civilization still needs heroes. A nation still needs a God above itself.
Hollywood can rewrite the hero. It cannot rewrite the law above him.
You can’t handle the movies anymore
Americans are breathing a sigh of relief at the apparent end of woke lectures masquerading as movies. The last few that slipped through have been sent to the box office graveyard.
But another problem remains.
What gives a human life ultimate meaning? That is a question woke ideology cannot answer. It is also the question every civilization, and every soul, must face.
As John Wick taught us, bad choices lead to consequences. And after 15-plus years of woke education and pop culture, one consequence may be that American audiences can no longer handle a movie that wrestles seriously with the deepest questions of human life.
Permit me to explain why this trouble looms on the horizon like Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.”
The woke agenda, with its oppression-studies degrees and DEI catechisms, has trained generations of students and audiences to think superficially. They are told suffering comes from “whiteness” and “heteronormativity,” and that if they elect enough democratic socialists, these problems will vanish and free stuff will rain down from heaven.
Spend enough time on a modern university campus, and you will see how often life’s deepest questions are flattened into identity categories.
Why do people suffer? Systems of oppression.
Why does life feel empty? Unjust structures prevent economic flourishing.
The standard DEI professor solves the problems of evil and meaning by reassuring one group of students that their hardships are caused by another group of students, and that each group can be identified by skin color and sexual preference.
The solution is always the same: Become an activist. Advocate for the marginalized. Restructure society. Stop whiteness.
Think of the Ralph Wiggum meme: “I’m helping.”
Movie after movie has thrown these inane answers at American audiences. Marvel has done more than most. It had a chance to get serious when Ultron sought a solution to the problem of evil. Instead, it simply got violent.
What was the franchise’s answer to evil? Some saccharine claim about the innate goodness of human beings when they are “free” under a nanny state of superheroes.
But those supposedly good humans are the same people who committed all the evil Ultron saw when he studied world history.
The Avengers are an existential nightmare, making one wonder whether each member of the team was meant to be a hero of the absurd after all.
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These reflections made me wonder whether today’s audiences, ruined by DEI, could watch a movie like “Cool Hand Luke.”
The film would almost certainly never be made today. But even if it were, would anyone make it to the end? Better yet, would anyone understand what the movie asks us to confront?
Luke, played by Paul Newman, returns home from World War II to a life with no obvious purpose. In a drunken act of vandalism, he cuts the heads off parking meters and is sentenced to a southern prison camp.
The crime is almost beside the point. The movie is not really about criminal justice. It is asking an older question: What does a man do when he cannot find meaning?
Luke’s struggle is existential. He first fights the toughest prisoner, and his refusal to stay down becomes a declaration that he will not surrender his humanity. Later, when Luke wins at poker, the men call him “Cool Hand Luke.”
His coolness is defiance against a universe that appears silent. If nothing matters, why get upset?
The prison itself becomes a metaphor for human existence. The laws appear arbitrary. Luke tells another prisoner, “All I see is a lot of guys laying down a lot of rules and regulations.”
Then, Luke’s mother visits one last time as she is dying.
Their final conversation is painfully cold. He calls her “Arletta” rather than “Mother.” Neither expresses love. As she leaves, he simply says, “So long, Arletta. Take care.”
Harry Dean Stanton sings “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” as Luke walks back into the prison. The inability of sentimentalized religion to give Luke meaning becomes the movie’s second theme, after the helplessness of law.
Soon afterward, Luke receives word of his mother’s death. He sings a mocking song about the empty superstition of popular religion:
Get yourself a sweet Madonna
Dressed in rhinestones, sitting on
A pedestal of abalone shell.
Going 90, it ain’t scary,
’Cause I got the Virgin Mary
Assurin’ me that I won’t go to hell.
Popular religion pours opium over the suffering of this life with empty sentimentality and promises of a better afterlife.
Neither law nor sentimental religion can quiet Luke’s soul. So he runs.
Captured once, he hears the famous line from the captain: “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”
After another escape attempt, the guards force him into a grotesque cycle of digging and filling the same hole.
“Luke, what’s your dirt doing in the boss’ hole?”
After Luke digs a grave-sized hole, another boss asks, “Luke, what’s your dirt doing on my yard? Put it back in that hole.”
This continues until his spirit finally breaks. He begs them to stop. He promises never to escape or back-sass again.
Yet he escapes once more.
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His final refuge is an empty church. There, Luke finally speaks honestly. He addresses God simply as, “Hey, Old Man.” He admits that he began strong but has grown tired. He wants answers. He wants someone to respond.
Silence.
“I guess you’re a pretty hard case too,” Luke concludes.
A fellow prisoner is sent in to persuade him to come out peacefully. Luke yells out the window, “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate,” but he is shot and killed before he can finish.
The movie refuses every easy answer. The audience is meant to leave and wrestle with the problem of meaning.
Luke cannot be right about final emptiness. But where can we find meaning if neither law nor superficial popular religion can provide it?
That is precisely the sort of question our culture increasingly avoids.
The last 15 years have been a parade of DEI sermons and ideological mush. The worry is that Americans raised in this, educated in woke K-12 schools, and graduated into oppression-studies assumptions would not know how to contemplate existential meaning in a movie like “Cool Hand Luke.”
They would reduce the story to demographic categories. White prisoner. White guards. Southern prison. Oppression explained. Luke deserves what he got.
As a philosophy professor, I hope Americans have not lost the ability to appreciate stories that force us to confront the deepest questions. I hope they are not merely rejecting the stupidity of DEI but also rejecting superficial answers and longing for something deeper.
What gives a human life ultimate meaning? That is a question woke ideology cannot answer.
It is also the question every civilization, and every soul, must face.
The dark religion behind ‘manifesting’
The power of positive thinking has taken an occult turn. After his UFC victory at the White House last month, Sean O’Malley told Joe Rogan that he had seen the outcome beforehand and manifested it into reality.
Whether he meant those words casually or literally, they reflect an increasingly common belief among athletes, entrepreneurs, influencers, and podcasters. Success is no longer merely achieved through discipline and hard work. It is manifested — even conjured. Consciousness itself creates the future.
Our thoughts influence our actions, but they do not govern reality. We make plans, set goals, exercise prudence, and work diligently. The outcome ultimately belongs to God.
At first glance, this language may sound harmless. Athletes have long used visualization techniques. Coaches encourage competitors to imagine success before a game. Olympic athletes mentally rehearse routines. Quarterbacks visualize throws. Fighters picture victories.
But modern manifesting goes far beyond sports psychology.
Traditional visualization is straightforward. Imagining success can improve focus, reduce anxiety, build confidence, and prepare the body for performance. The athlete does not create reality through thought. He prepares himself to perform when reality arrives.
Manifesting makes a different claim.
It holds that consciousness participates in creating reality. The fighter does not merely prepare for victory; he helps bring it into existence. The entrepreneur does not merely work toward success; he attracts it. The individual does not merely respond to the world; he creates his own reality.
This way of thinking has become so common that many people no longer recognize how strange it is. Yet it represents a significant religious shift in modern American culture.
Ironically, little about it is new.
The roots of today’s manifestation movement extend into 19th-century American religious history and, before that, into occult and hermetic traditions.
One important source was Christian Science, founded by Mary Baker Eddy. Christian Science taught that matter is subordinate to mind and that many human problems result from false thinking rather than objective conditions.
Christian Science differs from today’s manifestation culture in important ways, but both assign consciousness a far more fundamental role than traditional Christianity permits.
Closely related was the New Thought movement. Its writers and lecturers taught that positive thinking could produce health, prosperity, and success. The message was simple: Change your thoughts, and you can change your reality.
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Many modern manifestation teachers merely repackage New Thought for the social media age.
The vocabulary has changed, but the assumptions remain strikingly similar.
Instead of speaking about positive thinking — the scientific language of that era — people now invoke frequencies, vibrations, energy, alignment, and quantum possibilities — the scientific language of ours. Instead of spiritual laws, they speak of neuroscience and mindset.
The central claim remains unchanged: Your thoughts possess creative power.
The fundamental reality, they teach, is consciousness. The awakened self is divine.
This worldview also resembles older occult, esoteric, and theosophical traditions.
Historically, occult systems taught that hidden knowledge gave initiates access to powers unavailable to ordinary people. Reality operates according to secret principles that could be learned and harnessed. The enlightened individual gained mastery by acquiring that knowledge.
It is the promise of the serpent in the garden: You will know as God knows.
Human beings know by discovering what is real. God knows as the creator who determines what is real.
Modern manifestation culture often follows the same pattern. Its teachers claim that reality contains countless possible futures and that consciousness selects among them. Individuals are urged to discover hidden truths about their power, unlock limiting beliefs, raise their vibrations, and learn the principles by which the universe operates.
The pattern appears throughout many nonbiblical religions: You are a higher consciousness trapped in a body and must discover the secret that will restore you to divinity.
The problem is not sin but rather ignorance of your own godhood.
You do not need redemption through Christ to restore communion with God. You need enlightenment to remember that you are God.
That is why modern manifestation can accurately be described as a form of neo-gnosticism.
Ancient gnosticism taught that human beings contained a hidden divine element. The fundamental human problem was ignorance of this truth. Salvation came through secret knowledge that awakened people to their true nature.
Modern manifestation often follows the same structure:
You possess hidden creative powers.
You do not understand your true potential.
Limiting beliefs keep you trapped.
Special knowledge sets you free.
The language differs, but the story remains familiar. And its attraction is obvious.
Manifestation promises control in an uncertain world. It offers success without dependence, power without submission, and meaning without repentance. It assures individuals that they are not subject to forces beyond themselves but possess the power to shape their destinies.
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Yet the system contains a serious flaw: It is self-validating.
When someone succeeds, the success proves manifestation works. When someone fails, the failure is blamed on faulty manifestation. Success confirms the theory. Failure confirms it too.
It resembles the gambler who remembers the one time double zero hit twice in a row and forgets every losing bet.
A theory that can absorb every possible result explains nothing. It merely improvises a new explanation after the fact.
Christianity begins somewhere else entirely.
Scripture teaches that human beings are not creators but creatures. God alone exists from eternity. He created human souls and a material world, and he called that world very good.
Our thoughts influence our actions, but they do not govern reality. We make plans, set goals, exercise prudence, and work diligently. The outcome ultimately belongs to God.
The biblical question is not, “What reality can I create?” It is, “What has God ordained, and how should I respond faithfully?”
That distinction may sound subtle, but it marks two radically different visions of the world.
One places creative sovereignty in human consciousness.
The other places it in God.
So when O’Malley says he manifested his victory, he may mean only that he visualized success and prepared himself mentally. If so, there is little controversy.
But if he means that consciousness itself helped create the result, then he is participating in a much larger religious movement — one stretching from 19th-century metaphysical spirituality through New Thought and occultism into today’s podcast culture.
The language is modern. The temptation is ancient.
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